FNAF: Secret of the Mimic: Which Ending Is Most Likely Canon?

What is Arnold’s true fate in FNAF: Secret of the Mimic?

June 18, 2025, 3:15am

It’s common now for Five Nights at Freddy’s to have multiple endings in its games, and Secret of the Mimic is no exception. Naturally, that means that it’s up to the players and the community to figure out which ending is canon based on what we know about the series overall, and that’s not always an easy task. Then, there’s the added layer of difficulty that comes from the developers making multiple endings seem like plausible choices to be the canon ending. Luckily, the task of guessing which ending is canon is a little easier with Secret of the Mimic, as there’s a total of three endings you can get.

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In Secret of the Mimic, you play as Arnold, who’s been given the task of recovering items from Edwin Murray after he vanished without warning. As you might expect from FNAF, Arnold’s job takes a deadly turn with the Mimic roaming the area. The player characters don’t have a great track record in FNAF when it comes to happy endings, so let’s take a look at the endings that Arnold can have.

The Bad/Default Ending Is Unlikely to be Canon

This is the ending that you’re most likely to get in your first playthrough, especially if you go into the game blind. If you complete the orders that Dispatch has given you and hand over the Data Driver, then you get in your car and start to head home. Unfortunately, Dispatch informs you that you’ve stolen property because they never received the Data Driver, and that’s when you spot a red glow in your rearview mirror. As you might’ve guessed, the Mimic is in your backseat and drags you away to put you in a Freddy prototype suit and make you perform on stage.

The Fire Ending Is Most Likely Canon

Instead of handing over the Data Driver, you run Cradle.exe and set the Murray Costume Manor on fire. The Mimic chases you as you escape, and causes a car crash so it can take the Data Driver and leave you to potentially die, although it’s possible that Arnold survives the crash since we don’t have a way to know how much damage he sustained in it.

There are a couple of important reasons why this ending is most likely to be canon based on what we know from other games in the FNAF series. First, it lets us deep enough into the manor to find Fiona and learn more about M1 and M2, and gaining information is always crucial when it comes to piecing together the intricate lore of FNAF. Second, M2 would hold onto its homicidal nature in this ending, which we know it still has by the time we encounter it again in the Ruin DLC for FNAF: Security Breach. As a result, it currently makes the most sense to say that this is the ending that’s probably canon for Secret of the Mimic, not to mention that endings involving fire recur throughout the series.

The Moon.exe Ending Could be Canon

This is the secret ending that requires you to beat the game once and then beat it again on New Game+. It also requires you to pick up all 25 collectibles. After you fulfill those conditions and reach the end of the game again, you have the option to play the Moon.exe game. Completing this task gives you glitched permissions for your Data Driver, which gives you access to additional rooms in the manor, including David’s. You have to explore Edwin’s house to find the bedtime story tapes, then head to David’s room and essentially reprogram M2 so that it once again mimics David, leading it to take the tiger plush and go to bed.

This is the happiest ending, but it’s not as likely to be canon as the ending where Arnold is in a car crash. The main reason is because Arnold is able to fix M2 in this ending, returning it to its original state of mimicking David without the homicidal tendencies that developed from Edwin’s treatment of it. While it’s possible that it could learn the violence we see in Ruin from another person, part of the Mimic’s lore specifies that it learned violence from Edwin without mentioning it learning violence again at a later date.

As a result, the lore points to the car crash ending as the most likely canon ending. None of the endings line up perfectly with the next time we see the Mimic appear on the timeline, but there are quite a few years between Secret of the Mimic and Ruin, where the Mimic returns as an antagonist.